How to transfer Shazam to Spotify and other services?

We’ve all done it dozens of times. When a song comes on TV, during a series or a movie, we pull out our phone to “shazam” it. And, almost all the time, Shazam, this application downloaded more than two billion times – !!!! -reveals what we were listening to. It’s almost magical. But how best to use Shazam? How to transfer your Shazam data to Spotify and other streaming services? And what impact does Shazam have on the streaming world?

A bit of history

How to transfer Shazam to Spotify and other services? — Credit: Shazam website

The beginnings of Shazam date back to 1999. Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee got together to discuss concepts. Then students at the University of Berkley regularly exchanged business ideas and were passionate about technology. One day, Chris Barton had the idea of creating a music identification service. He thought it would be great to recognize a song playing somewhere using the audio from a phone. He pitched the idea to his colleagues, who quickly adopted it.

The following year, in 2000, Shazam Entertainment Limited was founded. Two years later, the first version of the application is unveiled: when they want to identify a song, users have to call a specific number, place their phone as close as possible to the speakers, and wait to receive a message once the song has been recognized. In 2008 the application was made available on the Apple Store for Android users. Shazam was about to take off. Three years later, it was possible to identify songs from TV series and commercials. In 2012, Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” was the first song shazamed a million times. A turning point came in 2018 when Apple bought Shazam for $400 million and integrated it into its services. In 2022, Shazam announced that the application has been downloaded 2 billion times and that they have recorded 70 billion Shazams.

The figures are colossal.

How does Shazam work?

Simply put, Shazam works like this: the application transforms an audio extract into a musical fingerprint, which it then translates into a code. This code is compared with millions of other codes in its database. Beware, however: Shazam’s database only contains songs recorded in studio format. For now, the application cannot recognize a playback or a track played live, during a concert, for example, as its audio fingerprint would inevitably differ from that of the studio version.

Once identified, you can search for the song on Spotify or Apple Music and add it to your playlist.

It’s worth noting that the application has been updated several times over the years. For example, it can now recognize songs broadcast on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. With its “Auto Shazam” option, Shazam can also, without you having to do anything, detect all the songs played while you’re scrolling, without you having to go back through the application.

Other apps are trying to build on Shazam’s success: this is the case of Deezer’s SongCatcher, available since 2017. Since last year, Deezer has added a rather fun new feature: you can now sing, hum, or whistle a tune from a song you have in your head, and SongCatcher should be able to find it.

Why is it important for artists to get their music on Shazam?

For an artist to have his or her music appear on Shazam, the procedure is pretty straightforward: he or she must submit a request to his or her digital distributor. The procedure is no different from that for other streaming services. The many possibilities offered by Shazam are then open to him or her.

Shazam offers the possibility of syncing each account with Spotify or Apple Music. The benefits are manifold: a user can immediately add a song to their Spotify or Apple library and thus add them to their playlists. In the medium term, artists can see their streams increase and be placed in influential playlists. What’s more, this feeds into your stream engagement statistics. Streaming platform algorithms will be more inclined to highlight songs via playlists with a high engagement rate. Shazam can have a real impact here.

Thanks to the Apple Music for Artists service, artists can access various statistics, including the number of Shazams for some songs. This shows their impact and demonstrates to specific influencers – DJs, playlist curators, etc. – the potential of their songs.

Impact on the industry

Shazam is now a must-have tool for artists, labels, and recording industry professionals. In 2014, former Shazam CTO Jason Titus told the Atlantic: “Sometimes we can see when a song is going to break out months before most people have even heard of it […] We know where a song’s popularity starts, and we can watch it spread“.

With millions of data generated weekly, Shazam has a precise view of potential hits and trends. The company doesn’t hesitate to make some of this data available to its users. For example, Shazam unveiled an interactive map showing which geographical areas were shazamming certain songs.

Having a song Shazamed millions of times can change the destiny of an artist and his music. If placing a song in a series or advert was already a big step, knowing that this placement can be extended and duplicated millions of times on streaming accounts thanks to Shazam opens up an infinite world of possibilities. Apple has also created a playlist of the top 50 Shazam tracks, updated weekly.

Radio stations, DJs, and anyone who broadcast music on a large scale now also use Shazam’s statistics to assess which songs will likely appeal to their audience. In just a few years, the tool developed by Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Avery Wang, and Dhiraj Mukherjee has become a key player in the music industry and is set to grow in importance.

How to transfer Shazam to Spotify?

Soundiiz works differently with Shazam than with other applications. We can’t directly retrieve data from your account and store it on Soundiiz and cannot transfer Shazam to Spotify directly. However, when you link your Shazam account to Spotify, a “Shazam” playlist is created on Spotify. The same goes for Apple Music – which makes sense since Shazam was acquired by Apple.

It’s these playlists that you can then transfer using our Transfer function, the details of which we explained here.

As explained on our Support page, you can also extract your Shazam data using this page.

Once you get the archive, extract the “SyncedShazams.csv” file and upload this file on Soundiiz by using “Import playlist” by file in top right of the interface.

You can also go directly to your Shazam Library interface and select “Download CSV”.

It’s straightforward and only takes a few minutes to transfer Shazam to Spotify or Apple Music. For other streaming services, we’ve also thought of everything.